About
Electra de Peyster has been gardening in Sonoma County, California since 1994. She began her garden related work in 1980 as a volunteer in the gardens at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. From there she took classes in garden design and horticulture at UCLA, started a small residential garden design company and obtained a California Landscape Contractor's License.
When she moved to Sonoma County, she became a lavender grower and partnered with Wally Brueske in Sonoma to build a distillery to extract plant essential oils. From 1997 through 1999, she volunteered at the Harvest for the Hungry Garden in Santa Rosa where food is grown for local food banks. It was here that her interest in saving heirloom vegetable varieties began. She traveled to Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa in 2002 to do research on seed saving and has attended two seed research seminars sponsored by the Organic Seed Alliance in Port Townsend, Washington. She began photographing plants to demonstrate their growth process from seed to new seed.
She is currently a UCCE Sonoma County Master Gardener and has taught a class on seeds and seed saving for the Master Gardener Library series. She is the founder of SeedStewards, a project that promotes seed saving of heirloom flower and vegetable varieties. In 2009, she published Portfolio, a photography journal of her garden. She is currently updating her book Visual Guide to Seed Saving.
Her newest projects include GardenStarts which provides information for starting vegetable gardens and Neighborhood Food, a community resource that provides information about locally produced food. Ongoing interests include integrating sustainable landscape design with green building design and exploring the use of native plants to attract bees, birds and other pollinators.